mytic method in eliot

European Scientific Journal March edition vol. 8, No.6 ISSN: 1857 – 7881 (Print) e - ISSN 1857- 7431

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THE MYTHIC METHOD AND INTERTEXTUALITYIN T.S. ELIOT’S POETRY

Manjola Nasi, M.A.University of Tirana, Albania

Abstract

The concept of intertextuality emerges in literary theory several decades after T.S. Eliot had written some of the

most influential poems and pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, but the notion is nevertheless applied both

theoretically and in practice to Eliot’s work.This paper sheds light on Eliot’s mythic method and its conceptual similarities to

intertextuality and related theories, as well as focuses on instances of the application of the former in his poems, depicting

the role of this mechanism in the poet’s literary works. Closely related to Eliot’s perception of tradition, it also supports his

use of techniques of collage and kaleidoscopic presentation of sources, archetype and images.

Keywords: Mythic method, T.S. Eliot, intertextuality, Modernism, allusions, quotations,

epigraph, Ulysses, intertextual relations.

1. Eliot and Joyce

The year 1922 saw the culmination of Modernism through the publication of some of

the greatest Modernist works, two of the most renowned of which were of course James

Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

A year after that, in 1923, Eliot published his review “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”, in

which he introduced his “mythic method”:

“In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and

antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They

will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an

Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of

controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of

futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated

by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe that Mr. Yeats to have been first

contemporary to be conscious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to


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it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make

possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we

may now use the mythic method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the

modern world possible for art.”1

Earlier in the same essay, Eliot called drew attention on the parallel to the Odyssey,

and the use of appropriate styles and symbols to each division [of Joyce’s work], explaining

that it was not, as many had seen it, “an amusing dodge, or scaffolding erected by the author

for the purpose of disposing his realistic tale, of no interest in the completed structure”.

Thus, to Eliot, the parallel use of the Homeric Odyssey was not an embellishment to

the structure of the new Ulysses, but rather an underneath semi-transparent multi-layered

stratum on a painting where the two would be present. The old Odyssey introduces the new

Ulysses to myth, history, human feelings and deeds. This past the Odyssey provides is as

complex and intricate as human activity itself, but on the other hand, it brings depth, memory

and meaning to an otherwise isolated bubble-like artificial creation. The forging of the old

into the new is to Eliot an act of alchemy, if we were to use the type of chemical symbolism

he employs in his “Tradition and the individual talent”, speaking of the role of the artist in the

process of artistic creation. The transtemporal and transhistorical product of this reaction calls

as much to consciousness as it does to unconsciousness. The use of its varied elements

produces a multifaceted entity that cannot be fully explored by rational thought, but can be

grasped more as an experience rather than as meaning. In his essay, Eliot mentions

psychology, ethnology and The Golden Bough (an anthropological work) as the fields of

human achievement that would shed light on this complexity.

It is quite obvious that Eliot identified Joyce’s method as similar to his own2. In

addition to the temporal depth, one of the important functions of this method was to provide

order, a way of organizing the various elements of the literary work without employing the

rigid rules of fixed and/or closed structures, the verbose elaborations of the narrative method

and all its connective restrictions. The mythic method provided no need for explanations.

Instead of isolated symbols, the mythic method introduced the mechanism of symbol

1Eliot, T.S. "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. NewYork: Harcourt, 1975, 178.2Segall, Jeffrey. Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993, 143.


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networks, which were significantly more powerful and contributed as much to meaning as

they did to structure – a combination addressing one of Eliot’s major concerns, that of unity.3

The other major characteristic of the mythic method was that it provided a basis for

comparison, serving to the ironic dimension of the new work. Almost cynical irony was the

most frequent attitude of the great authors of the Modernist period towards their subject-

matter, employed mainly with the intention of avoiding the authorial teary sympathy of realist

nineteenth century literature. In Joyce’s modern day London, Leopold Bloom walks his own

odyssey, but his life is neither heroic, nor means to be such. Mythological monsters are

replaced by a lot less powerful challenges and the Homeric Odyssey’s central theme, that of

the journey home (the Nostos), with home representing among other things a place of

warmth, love, comfort, safety, as well as hope for regeneration and continuity of life,

becomes just another day in the city. The past and present represented in the Homeric

Odyssey by Laertes and Telemachus are both hopelessly lost in Ulysses, with Bloom’s father

and son being dead. The tragedy of this loss is severe and it becomes more acute by the

parallelism with the Homeric respective characters, who choose to resist in an active manner

to the situations with which they are faced. The unambiguous objectives and strategies of all

the Homeric characters show their strength and their sharp orientation, as opposed to their

modern-day counterparts, leading (or opting out of) their confused lives.

In a very similar manner, we can investigate the mythological elements in The Waste

Land. In his very first note to the poem, Eliot explicitly speaks of how much he is indebted to

Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, saying:

“Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of

the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From

Ritual to Romance”.4

Further adding that another major influence was that of Frasier’s The Golden Bough.

Other notes bring more and more sources into play, of many different origins and each

affecting the meaning and structure by adding to the complexity of the destination poem and

at the same time preserving a relative independence that makes surface fragmentation more

obvious but also that helps bring the whole array together. If Joyce’s Ulysses demonstrates

consistency and relatively smooth transition from one element of the Homeric story to

3Eliot, T.S. “The Metaphysical Poets”. in T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays 1917-1932. London: Faber &Faber, 1933, 269.4Eliot, T. S., and Michael North. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York:W.W. Norton, 2001, 21.


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another, and an attentive reader can feel each of the two texts separately and the third one that

comes as a marriage of them, in Eliot’s poem fragmentation obscures the whole picture and

the initial text emerges sporadically only to disappear again. Before reaching into the layers

that separate the archetypal myths of Frasier’s or Weston’s account from modern life after the

Great War, the reader needs to travel through many other layers standing in between, or even

further in time and/or space, as it is the case with Upanishadic elements. Eliot’s myths

interact with the poem’s present as much as they do between themselves, but they perform

the same important functions as Joyce’s Odyssean elements. The radical effect of Eliot’s

complexity is the feeling of confusion, which is, in fact, one of the central emotions depicted

in The Waste Land.

If Joyce chooses to describe the human condition by illustrating it with well-defined

characters, Eliot’s characters are more fragmented, circumstantial and instrumental. The other

major difference is that in Joyce’s case the parallelism is rendered through allusion, while in

more than one instance, Eliot employs mythical characters directly, along with contexts from

the original sources. The central mythical quest is not very far from Joyce’s odyssey, with the

radical distinction of its even more encompassing nature. The quest itself speaks of a general

plague, selflessness and the fate of the community, through which the fate of the individual

can be imagined, while Joycean journey is seen as the personal quest of a small number of

individuals, through which the fate of civilization is implied.

2. Eliot and intertextuality

In his essay, Eliot saw the mythic method as manifested through the use of styles and

symbols, also noting its importance on form and structure. Yet, his definition of the radical

innovation which the mythic method was to him remains vague and somehow elusive. The

parallelism between Ulysses and The Waste Land serves as an important indication, since it

provides yet another case study as to the practical application of the mythic method. And

although myths are crucial, if we consider the name Eliot gave to the method but also the

influence of James G. Frazer, which is mentioned in the “Ulysses” essay and the first note to

The Waste Land, Eliot’s own use of this novelty was highly more complex and involved a

wide array of different techniques and mechanisms.

All these elements can be classified very inclusively under Kristeva’s term

“intertextuality”, which can roughly be described as a tangible relationship between two or

more texts. Not wanting to address the origin of this concept and the possible relations


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between it or Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and dialogism (which has been compared by critics to

Eliot’s concept of tradition5 and which is Kristeva’s starting point of the history of the idea of

intertextuality) to Eliot’s theoretical ideas,I will only discuss here very briefly why

intertextuality is the best umbrella term that would include the echoing of a text into another.

Although many opponents of intertextuality see it as a new name for “old tricks”, such as

allusion and influence6, the novelty of intertextuality is that it is not limited to either. And in

just the same way, it is broader than Eliot’s coining of the term “mythic”, which points at

myths as an exclusive choice, although its literary application offers a much wider variety of

devices. To illustrate this, it is sufficient to see Eliot’s use of other sources in his works,

mainly in The Waste Land.

One of the most original ways in which Eliot chose to integrate fragments of existing

texts into his own poems is through quotation. M. H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms

defines allusion as following: “[…] a passing reference, without explicit identification, to a

literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage.”7 It is thus

clear that the direct citation of lines or fragments of literary works can not be seen as an

allusion, although its referential function remains. Eliot used allusion extensively, and in his

poems quotation can be seen as a functionally similar but formally different device. It is

interesting to focus on one type of quotation in The Waste Land, where in more than one

instance, such as is the case of lines 31-34, 42, 76 (including slight adaptation), 202, 427,

428, etc. Eliot’s quotations are not in English, but respectively in German, French, Italian and

Latin. Is seems as if Eliot prefers quotations over the double “transfer” that an allusion would

require on the above lines, first being the translation and second - the contextual

modification. But instead, it is also relevant to take into consideration the thematic aspect of

The Waste Land, which aims to represent the temporal and spatial dimensions of human pain

and confusion, thus disregarding the limitations of living and dead languages, or simply put,

universalizing the poem. Allusion would be probably just as able to contribute in the meaning

of the respective sections, as in does in a considerable number of contexts in The Waste Land.

But the added function of quotation is that it plays a role on the structural level of the poem,

emphasizing fragmentation and at the same time estranging each instance of quoted lines

5Harris, Wendell V. “Bakhtinian double voicing in Dickens and Eliot”, ELH, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Summer,1990),445-458.

6Haberer, Adolphe. “Intertextuality in theory and practice”, Literatura, Vol. 47, No. 5, 2007, 59.7Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle, 1999, 9.


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from the present context and narrowing the distance between the text in The Waste Land and

other previous texts.

The power of quotations is fully explored in Eliot’s poetry. One of the significant

experiments involves combination of the technique discussed above with another crucial

device that is used throughout the different stages of his maturity as a poet, from “Prufrock”

to Four Quartets - i.e. epigraphs. The known function of an epigraph is to contribute in the

mood and meaning of a work, which it achieves by widening or quite the opposite, by

narrowing the scope of the remainder of the composing elements. In Eliot’s poems epigraphs

are frequent and they have an indisputably important role that affects the poem on all the

different levels. Given the fragmented structure of most of Eliot’s poetic works, the epigraph

becomes less isolated from the other lines as compared to instances of use by most authors,

and quotations in other parts of the poem can be seen as devices performing a parallel

function that follows a highly similar logic. In this respect and as seen above, it is interesting

to highlight that Eliot’s epigraphs, like many of his quotations, preserve their independence

while at the same time merging with the rest of the composing units. Thus, we may observe

that in most instances, the linguistic estrangement holds true for his epigraphs as well. In

“Prufrock”, the epigraph is a citation from Dante’s Inferno, and it is in Italian. In “La figlia

che piange” the epigraph is quoted from Virgil’s Aeneid and it is in Latin. In The Waste

Land, it is a quotation from Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, and it is in Latin, but within it is

included an Ancient Greek citation of the words of the Sybil of Cumae. In Four Quartets the

two epigraphs are borrowed from Heraclitus and they are in Ancient Greek.

Of course, not all the epigraphs in Eliot’s poems are in foreign languages, but the

linguistic distance can be perceived even in some of those that are in English, which manifest

some form of deviation from the standard of the day8. This particularity emphasizes the

intertextual nature of the epigraphs and enriches the temporal and spatial aspect of each

poem, which in turn contributes among other things to the universal dimension of human

experience in the course of time and regardless of differences in setting.

The epigraphs have many traits, principally functional traits, in common with the

myths and mythical characters evoked by Eliot in his poems and alluded to in his definition

of the mythic method. As far as characters are concerned, their reechoing is not exclusive to

8Such is the case of the epigraph to “Gerontion”, “Though has nor youth, nor age [...]” echoingShakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in which we notice the use of “hast”, the regular form ofShakespeare’s use, as well as one of the epigraphs to “The hollow men”, which is a quotation fromKonrad’s Heart of Darkness reading “Mistah Kurtz – he dead”, echoing the speech of Kurtz’s Africanslave.


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mythical characters, which is yet another manner Eliot pursues to draw parallels between his

works and other contexts, creating a network of intertextual links. In addition to historical

persons and literary characters from other works and authors that are invoked through

allusions, Eliot chooses to employ them directly in more than one instance. Such is the case

of Hamlet in “Prufrock”, although its function beyond the sphere of meaning is limited, or the

well-known case of Tiresias in The Waste Land, which is a crucial device in terms of content

and form, as admitted in the notes to the poem, and the list can continue. Another less

recognized example is again found in The Waste Land, and I would like to address it briefly

to illustrate the intertextual impact it has on all levels of the target context: Line 43 introduces

the reader to Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante (Eliot’s spelling), who is

acknowledged to have originated from Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow. In Huxley’s novel,

the fake sorceress appearing as Sesostris, which is the name of Egyptian kings, is in fact a

man, Mr. Scogan. It is interesting to point out how this character is related to Tiresias, the

unconventional narrator of The Waste Land: firstthrough the attribute of the double gender,

constituting among other things an element of structural cohesion. Secondly, the word

clairvoyant, which comes from French and means roughly “the one who sees clearly” is yet

another allusion to Tiresias, who was blind, and to other references to eyes in Eliot’s poem,

such as the eyes of the drowned Phoenician sailor or the single eye of the one-eyed merchant.

Finally, but of primary importance is the prophetic aspect, the ability to see beyond

what is visible: according to the legend, after the blinding of Tiresias by goddess Hera, Zeus

gave him prophetic powers in compensation. In note 218 to The Waste Land, Eliot admits:

“What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the subject of the poem”. If Tiresias’ prophetic powers are

seen in a positive light, the case of Madame Sosostris is not the same. Although she is

considered as ‘the wisest woman in Europe’, her pack of cards are “wicked” and her

conversations contain the ‘street wisdom’ that usually characterizes impostors. Although

elements of her vision are presented as truths later in the poem, the choice of her name is

another indication of the negative insinuations which point to her as the wrong destination of

great powers in a world where the natural order of things is disrupted. Thus, the intertextual

powers of this seemingly unimportant name choice for a character offer an immensely potent

device that provides a crucial contribution to all the different levels of the poem.


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3. Conclusion

The variety of Eliot’s intertextual devices is significant and it includes a large number

of instances of use. His concept of the mythic method presented in his essay on Joyce’s

Ulysses covers only a portion of the elements applied to his own literary work. Nevertheless,

we may conclude beyond any doubt that Eliot’s method was not implemented spontaneously

and without a prior project. A clear indication of the existence of conscious planning can be

observed in the notes attached to The Waste Land and in other instances in his critical

writings. All these practical devices are fully supported in Eliot’s theoretical concepts about

literature functioning as a system, which is presented very early in his essays. The degree in

which intertextual elements are present in Eliot’s poems is definitely one of the difficulties a

layman reader encounters in fully understanding Eliot’s work, which in turn is not a criterion

for appreciating and enjoying it. On the other hand, the mythic method, or its fuller version -

intertextuality, provide a rich background for the literary work, adding to its temporal aspect

and universal traits in a manner that no isolated piece of literature can achieve.

References

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle, 1999.

Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975.

Eliot, T.S. “The Metaphysical Poets”. in T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays 1917-1932. London:

Faber & Faber, 1933.

Eliot, T. S., and Michael North. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism.

New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Haberer, Adolphe. “Intertextuality in theory and practice”, Literatura, Vol. 47, No. 5, 2007.

Harris, Wendell V. “Bakhtinian double voicing in Dickens and Eliot”, ELH, Vol. 57, No. 2,

1990.

Segall, Jeffrey. Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1993.

mytic method in eliot

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